NI debuts PCI Express instruments, adds FPGA support
-- Test & Measurement World, 11/21/2006 5:49:00 AM
Electronica 2006 provided National Instruments with a venue to demonstrate its new high-speed digital I/O instruments for PCI Express, which deliver up to 200 Mbyte/s dedicated throughput per direction to and from the host processor.
The NI PCIe-6536 25 MHz and NI PCIe-6537 50-MHz digital I/O boards build on the throughput of the PCI Express interface to acquire and generate large digital patterns that are otherwise impossible to sustain. Engineers can use the new instruments to meet a variety of applications including interfacing to memory devices, emulating communications protocols, and testing image sensors and display panels.
The new NI PCIe-6536 and NI PCIe-6537 digital I/O boards offer a flexible, universal parallel interface that is entirely software configurable. The digital boards feature maximum clock rates of 25 MHz and 50 MHz across 32 channels for maximum sustainable throughput of 100 MByte/s and 200 MByte/s, respectively. Engineers can set the direction of each channel for acquisition or generation and can choose from 2.5-, 3.3-, or 5.0-V TTL-compliant logic levels per direction. The boards are capable of both synchronous and asynchronous timing modes for applications including pattern I/O, handshaking, and change detection. Engineers also can easily synchronize the new PCI Express digital boards with other PCI Express data-acquisition boards to create powerful mixed-signal test systems.
Devices built on slower buses, such as LAN, PCI, or GPIB, require large amounts of expensive, onboard memory to acquire and generate long waveforms at the maximum data rates of the instruments. The new digital devices take advantage of the high bandwidth of PCI Express and use inexpensive PC memory to increase performance while reducing the overall cost of the board.
Engineers can further reduce the development and maintenance costs of a new digital test system by using NI-DAQmx driver software and graphical programming to rapidly prototype their systems. Customers can reuse existing digital applications written with the NI-DAQmx API for the NI 6533 and NI 6534 digital devices with their new PCI Express instruments. The boards are also compatible with NI Digital Waveform Editor software for interactively creating, editing, and importing digital waveforms. The new instruments seamlessly integrate with the National Instruments LabView graphical programming platform, LabWindows/CVI software for ANSI C development, and NI TestStand test-management software.
FPGA pioneer programs
National Instruments also announced pioneer programs for two new devices based on the NI LabView FPGA module, giving engineers and researchers early access to technology for digital and communications system design. Engineers now can use LabView FPGA to write custom software for each device’s FPGA to prototype and test emerging standards or create custom protocols. With FPGA technology, engineers can repeatedly reconfigure hardware performance through software to meet next-generation requirements, which is a new approach to system design.
The high-speed digital test pioneer device features the largest LabView FPGA target to date. The product has four high-speed serial I/O lines up to 3.125 Gbit/s and 24 general-purpose digital I/O lines up to 400 Mbit/s. The PXI Express-based module offers a x4 connector for throughput rates up to 1 GByte/s for streaming applications. The digital pioneer device extends the capabilities of the company’s current high-speed digital devices beyond 200-MHz clock rates to empower engineers to interface to DVI, HDMI, SATA, IEEE 1394, and other high-speed digital protocols.
The digital pioneer program includes the new high-speed digital device, a PXI Express chassis and controller, LabView 8.20 Professional Edition, and the LabView FPGA module.
The communications pioneer device is a PCI board with two 14-bit IF input channels at 100 Msample/s and two 14-bit IF output channels at 200 Msample/s. The device features a LabView FPGA target, making it suitable for software-defined radio and RFID applications. Engineers and researchers can perform digital upconversion and digital downconversion in hardware to alleviate bus-bandwidth constraints and perform custom pulse shaping while still leaving the FPGA free for user-defined processing. The communications pioneer program includes the new communications device, LabView, the LabView FPGA module, and the Modulation Toolkit for LabView.
